I havent been on this forum in a long time... my beloved dakota is starting to fall apart on me, so today I went and looked at an 03 sport 5.7 single cab short bed auto ram. Its got 3.55's and LSD. I test drove it, and pretty much fell in love. The power was unbelieveable compared to my 3.9 dakota. This ram has about 78k miles on it. Im going monday morning so they can look at my truck and try to work out a number. They want 11k for it. I told him I wont take anything less than 4k for my truck. KBB trade in value is 4900 in "good" condition. Basically as long as I can just finance 7,000$ or less... I'll take it. Anything more and I'll walk. Im really excited as this would be my first new vehicle in like 8 years.

That being said... is there anything specific I should look for? It seems to be in really great shape. No rust whatsoever.

And yes... Ive already been looking at potential mods. The first thing Id do would be a superchips and a true dual exhaust. does anyone know if these trucks have torque management? if so, can you disable it with the superchips?

 

heres a pic

 

You have to pull (I don't recommend cutting it) the torque management wire (there are write-ups for this), the Superchips won't. You won't be able to do any trans tuning with an 03 unless you swap pcm's. 4.56's would be a helluva an upgrade to start with as well. Is it a 2wd or 4wd?

 

2 wheel drive.... I'd rather keep the 3.55's because this truck is going to be driven to work every day (40 mile round trip) on the highway. Honestly, I think this truck will get just as good of mileage as my 3.9 dakota did... it only got 18 mpg on the highway. Why dont you recommend cutting the wire? just a foolish thing to do? or would all that torque just be "unmanageable"? I did a brakestand burnout with it on my test drive and it left 2 nice strips of burnt rubber about 20 feet long.... I was pretty happy with that.

 

You asked what to look for..
The 03 5.7's do break valve springs and the LSD clutch pack retainers break and then grind away at the carrier housing. I have had both issues with my 03 in the 6 months I have had it. Still love it though!

 

They let you do a break stand on a test drive? Are you buying it from a friend or a dealership?

The 03's are the first year for the Hemi, so there are some quirks about it that the 04.5+ trucks don't have, but still for the most part a nice reliable truck from what I have read. I had an 04 (4.7L) and never had a problem with it in the 80k miles that I put on it before I sold it FWIW.

 

Those are the two biggest issues, the valve springs and the LSD " C-Clips" (if equipped with LSD). The springs were changed to stronger ones with only some of the earliest '04s still receiver the weak ones, but the LSD is still a POS to this day.

After that, the rest is pretty much common stuff that you'd look for when looking to purchase an 8 year old vehicle...

 

At 120,000 miles I have yet to have either of these problems.

 

Did you notice any gains or benefits from the Taylor shorties?

 

what they dont know wont hurt them lol